Promethean: Chapter 14
Fishing
After drying off, Abbé took two fishing rods from his hold. Handing one to his student, he said, “Here’s how you’ll eat while at sea, or wont. The fish have a choice, but your lure should entice, and skill convince—one day. Not today… But I have been proven wrong before.”
“Abbé, I have a question.”
“Just one?”
Having learned his teacher’s humor, he smirked and said, “For now.”
“If it is whether I made these, yes, the pole and the lure. But Miguel, the watchmaker, crafted the reel and line. A blessing from one who, like God, has mastered time, for these are his best designs.”
“I figured you made it all, but now I look forward to meeting the watchmaker, too. I wanted to ask—”
“We’ll talk while we fish. Watch and copy my cast.”
Looking at his student, Abbé reached back with the end of the rod, then smiled and winked before hurling the long pole forward, sending its tackle flying through the sky, stretching to the edge of the harbor. Abbé whistled until it splashed, dancing a little when it did. Abbé then sat with his feet hanging off the dock’s edge and said, “It looks like a feat of strength, but it is more about finesse and the energy you transfer to it. Now you try. Don’t huck it! Wind up what’s in your heart and send it all out there. What you get back is more than breakfast—it is your desires.”
Watching Abbé slowly reeling in the line, he peered across the low ripples and thought of what was inside. Then he reached back as Abbé had and threw his cast. The lure hurtled high and long, and for a moment, it looked as if it would keep going and hook the sun. Abbé gasped as it hit the surface meters beyond where his line had fallen. Forgetting what he was doing, Abbé stopped reeling and stared at his student with new understanding. He was a new man, one searching for himself at the edge of what he could be. Abbé patted the dock and told his student to sit. Grinning as he did and sure of himself, he reeled in his hand-carved and painted wooden bait, hoping to catch a created thing to eat.
“Now, what were you going to ask?” said Abbé.
“It is nothing, never mind. I forgot.”
“Oh, don’t be like that!” Abbé said. “Go on and say what it was you were saying.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said his student, slowly turning the handle of his reel, mimicking a false fish to catch a real one. Abbé sensed the question and set to working it out of him. “Here, try this,” said Abbé, tilting the end of his rod left, then right, then up and down. “It has the effect of teasing, appearing to our breakfast as the real thing. Something living, breathing, asking to be eaten.”
“That’s what I’ll be,” he said to Abbé. “Someday out there… I’ll be the lure for a monster. A wooden man, merely the shape of what a man could be. Empty, full of nothing; material carved by something smarter. It made a lure, made me: bait for it to feed. That’s all I am. A pretend fish made to appear real and cast out to feel true. Abbé, did you feel this way?”
“That I was something more? Yes, and I’m confident when I say that everyone here once did too. We’ve all been thrown into the sea and felt that sinking feeling before being swallowed up and later spat on the shore.”
“Before, you said some haven’t come back,” he said, reeling in his line with slow half turns while dipping and lifting the end, followed by subtle flicks left and right.
“They haven’t come back yet. There is hope,” Abbé replied, watching his student fish by imitating every manipulation of his wrist. “For some, the transformation takes a long, long time. I’m not sure why. It can take days, weeks, or months. Once, since I’ve been here, it has taken a year.”
“What’s it like?”
“Dreadful. I won’t lie,” said Abbé. “It is the scariest thing one will ever do, jumping into the thing you love to be consumed. But it must be done if you want to live—if you want to become what lurks inside and terrorizes you. There is no other way to overcome what brought you here. No choice except the one inducing the most fear, that emotion saying don’t whispers the value of things true; a commanding voice that cannot be ignored. The more we try, the more it hurts. To be rid of that pain, we must survive the dark, deep, monstrous thing; emerging differently than the lifeless lure we once were… there, you’ve caught breakfast.”
“What?”
“You’ve got a fish! Pull! Pull back!” said Abbé, jumping to his feet. “Reel! Reel! Reel!”
Doing as his teacher said, he cranked the rod until it became a crescent while his right hand turned and turned. Watching the water, out jumped his first catch, long and silver, its splash making a rainbow in the morning sun.
“Don’t let up now! It’s a fighter. Reel!”
He pulled and wound the line. His muscles burned. His arms grew weak as the effort increased. He closed his eyes and saw the thing, most beautiful and dangerous, full of teeth. He saw himself being eaten. Saw that infinite black would make him.
Abbé took his net and swung it down to the water’s edge. Securing the fish, he said, “That’s a fair-sized blue! Not bad for your first cast. Now what was that question you were going to ask?”
Looking into the net, his student said, “Have you got a name for me yet?”
“Peter,” replied Abbé. “Because you are a rock.”
“A rock?”
“Rocks don’t know their worth until they’ve been used to create or destroy. Your heart seeks ruin. That’s why you easily caught a fish, yet struggled to swim; a sinking stone glints in the sun, attracting the death of unsuspecting flesh—for what use?” Abbé removed a fishing weight from his pocket and studied it before dropping it into the water. He shrugged his shoulders and brows, frowning as it disappeared. “Our meal is waiting. Help remove this hook. Watch your fingers, otherwise it will eat before us. Something tells me you’ll need those.”
As Peter gripped the lure and removed it from the fish’s jaw, he felt within himself that strange form rise. Something he would learn to catch with his own sacrifice, becoming the stone he needed to smash all he had left; the stone needed to rebuild that corrupted place. He would return, but first, he must earn his name.